‘What is visible… and what isn’t’: A public art intervention for re-imagining the food system

Industrial meat production fuels multiple socio-environmental crises and needs to be urgently addressed. Art practice research offers an original way of re-imagining the existing food system. Such research develops an open-ended, transformative approach for learning about and experimenting with possible food futures, creating a critical mass for change. Yet, creative geographers have also been calling for developing art practice research that imagines and engenders alternatives to the status quo. This paper contributes to the question of what creative practices can ‘do’ by discussing art practice-led research that challenges and re-thinks the industrial meat production geographies status quo. Here we consider the transformative potential of SOW – an AR public art intervention into the industrial meat complex. SOW is an animated digital sculpture appearing in AR in six locations linked to industrial pork production across England, filling them with distinct pig noises. We look closely at human encounters with SOW during two walking workshops conducted in June 2024 called ‘SOW in the City’: one as part of the London Festival of Architecture and the other as a ‘fieldtrip’ for the Royal Geographical Society Animal Geography Working Group's Multispecies Methods Workshop. Encountering SOW created spaces for reflecting on the current industrialised food system and contemplating alternatives to it: exploring new ways of seeing and thinking about the present and future human/non-human relations within it. SOW performed an act of revealing industrial meat production geographies in a playful yet informative fashion. Encountering her also planted seeds for connecting with both the non-human agents within the food system and beyond and the spaces that they inhabit. Finally, SOW also generated reflections on the futures within and beyond food production.